The 20 Meg Seagate 225 and the 40 MB Seagate 251 were the “Model t”’s of mid-80’s computing. They were included in almost every white box setup and a lot of the name brand PCs. There used to be over a dozen hard drive players. Now there are four or five (Remember Priam, Rodime, Core, Quantum, Conner, CMI, Micropolis). I do NOT miss MFM drives and DOS debug.
I remember those. I worked at a PC retailer in the early ‘90s and the ST251 was the drive of choice for the PCs we built. I had an ST251-1 in a NEC 386 that I purchased from my employer. The rest of the computer was crap, but the Seagate was bulletproof.
When my stimulus check comes in in the next couple of weeks, I’m ordering parts for two new computers for me and the wife. Both will include Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB SATA drives.
}:-)4
I've actually still got a Priam 130MB ESDI drive somewhere in my basement. It used to be in an Everex Step 20-386. When it would power up, it sounded like a jet engine spinning up! I also remember when Seagate bought Conner and CDC, and now that I think about it, I still have a Micropolis 1GB hard drive in a Compaq computer. It was the first generation ATA drive, but no computer BIOS would support it. There was a jumper on it to make the drive "look" like a pair of 500MB drives!
You're right about there being fewer and fewer manufacturers out there...
There's Seagate (which also owns Maxtor now), Hitachi (which bought IBMs drive plants years ago), Samsung, WD, and Toshiba. I think that's about it.
Mark